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Customer, which has previously sued Moniker, says domains should have been renewed.

A client of domain name registrar Moniker has sued the registrar, arguing that the registrar mistakenly let domain names expire.

Given the troubles Moniker has experienced over the past couple years, it might be easy to accept the allegations as fact. Yet, there’s a bit of history between the client and Moniker that suggests judgment should be reserved.

In the lawsuit, Mainstream Advertising alleges (pdf) that Moniker let 1,000 domain name registrations lapse that should not have. It says it received a notice that the domains were renewed, but Moniker later said that Mainstream was out of funds with the registrar and owed it money. Mainstream says it had a credit card on file.

Verisign’s latest .com monthly report has been published by ICANN, and Moniker’s woes from its platform switch over the summer appear to have finally caught up with it.

Moniker lost 61,191 .com domain names to transfers in October 2014. After its disastrous platform switch in June, it lost at least 17,500 .com domains to transfers each month, peaking at 26,681 in September. The October jump is huge. (ICANN publishes the reports after a three month waiting period.)

The registrar dropped below the million .com registration threshold in September. In October it dropped below 900,000.

Its October numbers were also hurt by few new registrations. Only 3,272 .com domains were registered at Moniker in October, but 19,192 were deleted. Click here to continue reading…

Last month I reported that Moniker only lost 17,506 .com domain names to transfers in June after its disastrous switch to a new registrar platform. I predicted that the number would shoot up in July, since it was easier to transfer domains out at that point. (Official .com registry reports are published three months after the end of the month).

The July report is out, and Moniker’s losses in July were essentially the same as June. The register lost just 18,057 domains to transfers. Click here to continue reading…